Drinking Up Old Tears
Any interest I had in competitive sports died a dusty, sweaty death during the annual “Sports Week” at the Christian “English Medium” (meaning lessons were in English) school, of which my mother was headmistress. This Christian school was in a Muslim village eight miles from the mostly Hindu village where I lived. The only live clip of a Summer 2021 Olympics event I watched was third-hand: through my iPhone, watching a group of people crammed into a verandah watching a small TV, on which a woman from Manipur, “India” was hovering above a 49-kilogram barbell. She bent as the anchor, speaking Hindi, wondered: would she, or wouldn’t she? Cheeks puffing like puris in hot Dalda, the athlete heaved the weight up, stood, waited, then dropped it. The verandah became a landscape of celebration: Mirabai Chanu, the Manipuri railway ticket collector, had won India’s first Olympic medal.
Like a dreamer half aware of her dream-self’s next move, I took a screenshot of Mirabai’s face, and lobbed it into the twilight zone of Instagram. India’s first Olympic medal won by a Manipuri sister, I wrote, Respect . . . and yes, I am talking to mainland Indians in ways too complicated to go into in an IG post.
As I watched the “story” populate the endless feed, I felt ashamed, like when I was a schoolgirl newly occupying adolescence and heard a male teacher say, “Hait! You—look!” Following his pointed stick, I saw blood trickling down my legs, past the green skirt’s hem.
Here I was, nearly eight thousand miles away, using a fellow Manipuri’s victory to bring up grievances I’d believed to be long abandoned. This time, it was me holding that stick, me pointing at my defiled legs.
~
India’s shape is pleasing, like a mermaid—unlike, say, the U.S.’s, which evokes a cow who’s been grazing too long. The mermaid has two arms. The left, rather stunted one is Gujarat, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi (the “Father of the Nation”) and the current far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi (consider him an equanimous, self-possessed version of Donald Trump, a simplification not too far-fetched). History’s sense of humor is morbid. The mermaid’s right arm is longer, more complex: a patchwork of seven states connected to the mainland by a 60-kilometer long strip called the Siliguri Corridor, a.k.a. the Chicken’s Neck. These seven states—including tiny Sikkim atop the Chicken’s Neck—comprise “northeast India.” Assam appears as a lynchpin; several smaller states—Manipur, too, which my ancestors left for Assam, where we form a minority—cluster around it.
If you took a bus on the National Highway 53 in the part that drops from upper Assam like a turd, you’d eventually arrive at a junction with a tea stall, a cloth merchant named Bardia’s, and a few other shops. The bus would turn left, towards Manipur, then you’d disembark, take the route abandoned (right), and eventually run into a certain water pipe. This pipe marks a lane’s entry point.
Perhaps at that water pipe I might find the source of my shame and confusion.
To catch the bus, I’d walk past that pipe. The village’s women gathered there twice daily, pots in hand, for the treated water sent by the neighboring Public Health Engineering department.. The water’s arrival coincided with my departure for and return from school. My two older sisters had water-fetching duty. Various humiliations were doled out at this community gathering place, as my father had converted to Christianity, forsaking his ancestors’ religion. Most of the villagers, nearly all related to us somehow, were unhappy about this. But before I saw the women who taunted my sisters, who said to me “Who will ever marry you, little girl?”, I would first have passed my paternal aunt’s fence. She had long legs and kept watch from behind this boundary with a martial ardor. No one I’ve met since can launch a missile of spit like my aunt. When I was very little, she snatched my only cloth doll and declaring her wish to “check whether Baby’s doll can dance,” tried to pull its limbs asunder.
The lane’s last house, right before the pipe, belonged to my father’s cousin whom my grandfather had treated like a son after Baba’s conversion. This uncle had lost his father, a compounder who’d served the British in North India a short while after his feisty horse threw him off and gave him a fatally well-placed kick. There was an aura of tragedy and respectability around my uncle, who was a schoolteacher in the local vernacular school. The two of us often crossed paths. I learned to give way to him and his Hercules bicycle; he was intent on wheeling forth, monopolizing the narrow dirt lane as though I was an ant. This man—his hair an architectural marvel, slicked from above his left ear towards his right—would seal my desire to flee when I was old enough to wear a woman’s phanek, a sarong. Sent over to help, I began filling empty water tumblers awaiting the feasters who would arrive for my next-door cousin’s loukhatpa (a ceremony after elopement, when the family feels moved to recognize the union).
My uncle, holding his dhoti in one hand, hurried out of the verandah: “WHO TOLD HER SHE COULD POUR WATER HERE—SHE IS UNCLEAN!” That face, murky with hate towards a child who had done him no wrong, is a face I wish to wipe off memory’s slate. I ran home, crying. I wished I had my aunt’s courage—to spit right on his glorious hair. Not even one strand misplaced. But what I despise most now is how I displayed my humiliation, leaving whatever dignity I had in that dirt courtyard.
~
At the age of eighteen, I did make my escape—to a college nearly 150 miles away in a hill station that used to be the British Capital of Assam and East Bengal (before Assam was carved up, and before East Bengal became East Pakistan, then Bangladesh). On a clear winter morning, I could see the Himalayas, a queue of barely-there pearls. I dunked butter cookies in my tea and studied journalism. Sometimes, when asked where I was from, I fudged the truth. “Silchar,” I’d say, naming the district headquarters an hour away from the village, where Revlon lipstick and washing machines could be bought.
I began freelancing, writing flowery, mediocre pieces which often contained allusions to our grievances painted with a broad brush: mainland vs. northeast Indians. Prior to colonization by the British, the northeast had hardly anything in common with the rest of the mermaid. Our geographic isolation was a reminder of the unmappable facts: that northeast Indians look far more East Asian than South Asian, and are often met with ignorance (“I am not Chinese!” my father said to a YMCA clerk in New Delhi, “That is why I did not show my passport!”) or worse, racism; in the wake of Covid-19, northeast Indians, who look like the Olympian Mirabai Chanu, were spat upon in India’s great metropolitan cities, called “coronavirus”, and told to go back to China.
The northeast had been “left behind” economically speaking. My classmates and I in the rural school all dreamed of running after real opportunities “out there.” There was no doubt that, if fate was kind, we’d squeeze past the Chicken’s Neck to find them. Many mainland Indians still consider the northeast to be a “backward” frontier. This isolation and exclusion has its roots both in the messy Partition of 1947 and in colonial policies the central government seems to have had no trouble clinging to. The northeast is mostly seen as a place where undeclared wars are fought with secessionists, the neighboring Chinese and generally Bangladeshi migrants are to be staved off, and where, as an Indian-American colleague in Southern California would later ask me earnestly, “people pick tea?”
It was away from my village that I first learned of human rights atrocities committed by Indian military and paramilitary forces in the process of crushing separatist movements in “disturbed areas” (including Assam and Manipur). The Armed Forces Special Powers Act—which grants the armed forces the right, among other things, to arrest, shoot to kill, or detain a ‘suspect’ without a court order—also has its origins in pre-Independence India. Then-Viceroy Lord Linlithgow enacted the Armed Forces Special Powers (Ordinance) to suppress the Quit India Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other freedom fighters were imprisoned, thousands shot, protesters tortured. After independence, Nehru—as India’s first prime minister—reincarnated that same ordinance to quell the Naga insurgency in Assam.
In my newfound vocation I became—to steal a line from Don DeLillo’s White Noise—“devout in my victimhood.” How could I not? In those years, I never looked too hard within. It was so easy, natural even, to drown the questions of my own particular identity in the tide of larger injustices.
When the holidays came around, I rode a bus for seven hours, generally the Capital Travels, whose advertised promise of air-conditioning was often broken. The heat choked me, as did the water pipe, the dirt lane, and my aunt’s face popping up over her fence. I did not even give my uncle and his glorious coif a glance if our paths crossed. I could not wait to board the Capital Travels again.
At the age of twenty-two I immigrated to the U.S.—nearly 8,000 miles away. My first job was as an administrative assistant. One afternoon the phone rang, and on the other end was a voice with a decidedly Manipuri accent. It is a mystery as to how—I will call her Shalini—found me. Would I, she asked, join the North America Manipuri Association? Her diligence might be explained by the fact that there are, I think, only a couple hundred Manipuris in America. The association’s aim, in short, is to keep Manipuris so very far from home feeling like Manipuris.
“I’ll call you sometime,” I said, coughing up some excuse involving the membership fee, and, of course, never followed up. How could I explain to a stranger that I had reconciled myself to the status of an outsider, that my past held no place for me?
A year or so later I enrolled in my first creative writing class at the community college where I work. In that always too-bright classroom, something unpredictable happened. Without any permission from my conscious self, my imagination and psyche led me back to a Manipuri village by the Barak River in Assam. While the compulsion was entirely alien, this first-timer knew something larger than me was happening. I did not stop to question it. There were no Christians in my fictional village. Thanks to YouTube and many scholarly papers, I learned more about Manipuri culture, religion, and folkways than I had in my childhood. And I fell in love, madly, as one who can never hope to possess the object of their love.
As I began writing what became my novel-in-progress, Goddess of Spiders, I saw how being “of two worlds”—as Naipaul put it in his Nobel lecture—came with a particular advantage. It was the advantage bestowed upon the child who looked through split bamboo fences at rituals she was not allowed to partake in, and who—perhaps out of some buried impulse to create meaning and thus survive—had memorized the most mundane details: a dog’s paw print over food placed upon a banana leaf (left outside the gates for the ancestors), the lane’s smell (stagnant water, indeterminate smoke, rotting food), an uncle’s finely constructed hair.
I began to enter the minds of people like my aunt and uncle, only I couldn’t despise them because I was them. I venerated their ancestors, plucked their choicest hibiscuses, and filled their water tumblers on feast days. No longer was I condemned to be an outsider. Even the perpetrator’s camp welcomed me.
A couple of years after I began writing fiction, a Manipuri film, Loktak Lairembee (“Lady of the Lake”) was screened at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. I went. The previous film, a Hindi feature, ended, and when the theatre’s doors opened, such a crowd issued forth that I flattened myself against the walls. They were almost all Indians of the kind clearly identifiable as Indian (or Southeast Asian).
Inside, I kept turning around in my seat. Was the theater practically empty? It was, except for me and my (non-Manipuri) husband, a Manipuri family who had traveled from Northern California, and a few others. The theater grew dark. When I heard the sounds of my mother tongue inhabit that darkness I began to weep, not understanding what I was weeping for. Possibly the fib about the membership fee crossed my mind.
“Writing about why you write is a funny business,” Patricia Hampl wrote, “like scratching what doesn’t itch.” So it is. Though I cannot explain why, in writing fiction set in a village much like my own, I felt, unequivocally and for the first time, Manipuri. Perhaps hearing my native language in the LA movie theater reminded me that this love, like everything resurrected, is temporal, a reflection . . . the original is out of reach, hiding in the darkness.
As I immersed myself in things I tried to forget, I slowly began to inhabit all the former, discarded selves: I see that in crafting that hasty Instagram “story” about the Olympian, I’d slipped into the aggrieved northeast Indian journalist self. I watched over and over Mirabai’s hopeful comment to the Chief Minister who video-called to bury her in a Landslide of Good News (A present of 1 crore rupees! No more collecting train tickets! New job coming soon!): “Those [Indians] who have no idea where Manipur is,” Mirabai said, “will know now.” My inner eyes rolled—they likely are still rolling—unconvinced as I am that a silver Olympic medal flashed in any new dawn of awareness about Mirabai’s home, way beyond the Chicken’s Neck.
I turn, at last, to the inner shame my rant at mainland Indians provoked. Was it because that “story” in no way hinted at the complexity of my identity? Not even a hint of the fact that I was a former pariah who still does not know where she belongs, a Manipuri from southern Assam, an “Indian-American” who refuses to speak Hindi to fellow immigrants, tired of being asked how a foreigner comes to speak . . .? And how could I fit into that “story”—this essay even—the unaccountable lightness I felt when I did break my non-Hindi-speaking streak? This was to a Gujarati store clerk in Culver City’s Samosa House, who, when I’d drifted towards the incense, told his coworkers: “Woh bhi Bharat se hain.” She’s from India, too.
Bharat, India . . . that gracefully-shaped hurt containing the home I still seek, in nearly every word I write, every whiff of robust, roasting spice as I walk through Santa Monica’s neat avenues, irrespective of all the evidence.
Grace Singh Smith's stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Santa Monica Review, Cleaver, Aster(ix), The Texas Review, Home (Heady Mix), and elsewhere. Her story “Oshini” was selected for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, and her story “The Promotion" was cited as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2016. She is Santa Monica College's spokesperson and is blog editor at AGNI.